The world does not need less of our creativity right now. It needs more of it.
When there is so much to grieve, resist, repair, and protect, writing can feel small, indulgent even. Shouldn't we be doing something more useful?
But what if your creative practice isn't separate from the healing of the world but an essential part of it?
In this free two-hour workshop, we'll explore what's asking for healing in your creative life, relationships, communities,
the more-than-human world, the stories we've inherited, and the stories we're writing next.
Through writing prompts and reflection, we'll listen for what's wounded, what's longing for our attention, and what wants to be imagined.
WHAT WE'LL EXPLORE TOGETHER
Six ways we'll think, write, imagine, and make our way toward what's asking for healing:
Attention
In a time of so much mis-seeing and misunderstanding, paying attention is an ethical act. Writing asks us to look closely, listen deeply, and witness. Attention is a form of devotion. We can't tend or repair what we refuse—or fail—to see.
Repair
Is repair possible? What might it look like? How can our art contribute to healing in all its forms? These questions will animate our time together. Not everything can be repaired. Not everything can be restored to what it was. But we can ask what comes next—and what role creativity might play in helping us live toward what could be.
Belonging
Artists have always made their work in difficult and frightening times. We are part of a long lineage of people who have kept making, imagining, questioning, and paying attention no matter what was happening around them. Gather with other writers and artists and remember we never make art alone.
Imagination
Before we can bring a more just and life-giving world into being, we have to be able to imagine it. Writing and art-making exercise our imaginations, helping us see beyond what is toward what could be. Healing requires us to imagine what could be otherwise.
Creativity
My mentor, the late theologian Gordon Kaufman, called God “serendipitous creativity”—the mysterious, ongoing emergence of the new. Creativity belongs to all of us. When we make something that did not exist before, we participate in that generative and transformative force.
Possibility
Writing and art-making help us loosen. They ask us to stay with uncertainty and mystery, to question what we’ve been told and taught, and to resist the idea that things must remain as they are. Creative practice makes room for what we don’t yet know, what we haven’t yet imagined, and what might still become possible.
WORKSHOP DETAILS &
WHAT TO BRING:
WHEN: November 14, 2026 from 2-4 pm PST (United States)/ November 15, 2026 from 9-11 am AEDT (Australia)
WHERE: On Zoom (and it will be recorded if you can't attend the live session)
BRING: Something to write with/on (paper/pencil/computer -- whatever works for your body). You'll receive a workshop prep document. Come ready to write!
During the 2-HOUR live virtual workshop, you will:
- Explore what’s asking for healing—in your creative life, your communities, and the world around you
- Listen for what your creative work is asking of you now through a short, inspiring talk from Sarah about why making art matters, especially in difficult times
- Dive into powerful generative writing prompts designed to help you pay attention to what is wounded, what you love, and what you want to protect
- Practice imagination as a form of repair, moving beyond what is toward what could be otherwise
- Make a plan to protect your creative life in the year ahead, with concrete intentions for the time, space, support, and community your work needs
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Get an opportunity to enroll in 2027 Word Project workshops and keep making your creative life a priority in the new year
✨ AND A FEW GIFTS! Everyone who registers will receive:
- A discount on Fragments of World Alteration, a guidebook to help you carry what you discover in this workshop into your creative practice in 2027!
- Three months of FREE access to Prompts & Circumstance (a generative writing prompt library)
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One-month FREE access to Office Hours (a Q&A with me where you can ask all your questions about writing & publishing)
This workshop is for everyone.
Writers and artists of all levels ready to deepen their practice
Visual artists, poets, essayists, dreamers, journalers -- anyone who suspects art might help us find our way through
People overwhelmed by politics or heartbreak who need a place to metabolize it on the page
News junkies and doomscrollers who suspect their vigilance isn't changing the world but long to act and create in meaningful ways
Anyone craving community, courage, and tools to keep creating even when things feel uncertain and scary
Everyone needing a reminder that making art is one of the most urgent and world-repairing things we can do
Meet Sarah Sentilles
Every November, I offer a free community workshop to help us turn toward the new year remembering why our creative lives matter. Supporting artists to make their work is a kind of activism for me.
"What Is Asking for Healing?" feels especially powerful and deeply personal. The question of repair animates the new project I’m writing now, the work I do with immigrants in my own community, and the daily work of parenting and being in relationship. Through all of it, I’ve become more convinced than ever that making art is not a luxury or an escape, but an urgent, essential practice that helps us survive, imagine, heal, and flourish.
I am the author of five books, including Draw Your Weapons, which won a PEN-America Award for Creative Nonfiction. Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and Idaho Book of the Year. My writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Oprah Magazine, Los Angeles Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. I've had residencies at Hedgebrook and Yaddo. I earned a bachelor's degree at Yale and master's and doctoral degrees at Harvard. I taught at universities for a decade and am the co-founder of the Alliance of Idaho, which works to protect the human rights of immigrants.
I am represented by Molly Friedrich at The Friedrich Agency.